The following essay appeared in the May, 2003 issue
of Ingram's Advance e-letter, as part of National
Book Award Classics, a monthly series of essays by Neil
Baldwin, highlighting past Winners of the National Book
Award.

Bruce Catton (1899-1978)A Stillness at Appomattox Winner of the 1954 National Book Award for Nonfiction

"The soldier lived at the bottom
of the pool, in the dim greenish light in which no outlines
were very clear. He had seen army commanders come and
he had seen them go, and he was going to take very little
for granted. The only certainty was that the campaign
ahead was going to be very rough, and the men frankly
dreaded it

"There
had never been a fight like this before. Things were
clear enough on the map, and [the General] had an uncanny
way of studying a map once and then carrying it in his
memory, but neither he nor anyone else had ever tried
to fight a battle in a place where nobody could see
anything at all There were no adequate roads, and
the most careful directives could come down to a matter
of saying - The enemy is over there somewhere; go and
find him and fight him."

Those of you who have been following my column as it
has been developing over the past several months - and
even readers coming to this page for the first time
-- will concur that a literary classic possesses a timeless
quality in many respects. It is timeless in the sense
that it can stand up to constant revisiting;
each and every occasion that we return to the classic
work, we perceive something new, and take away a fresh
insight.

It is timeless in the sense of style;
even if the syntax is archaic or unusual, the message
comes through.

And - as in the case of the two passages
cited above, excerpted from A Stillness at Appomattox
- we read Bruce Catton's words with an especially
haunting feeling of timelessness: could this be, of
all things, a metaphorical war? Are we actually being
transported into the middle of the Civil War, or are
we reading last month's newspaper reports from Iraq?

We
surrender to the narrative power of the author time
and time again as we read Bruce Catton's hypnotic account
of the last year of the Civil War, final volume of his
'Army of the Potomac' Trilogy, winner of the 1954 National
Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Pulitzer Prize.

Born in the northwestern Michigan town of Petoskey,
Bruce Catton grew up in Benzonia, southwest of Traverse
City along Highway 31 on the banks of the Benzie River
near Crystal Lake. His father was Principal of Benzonia
Academy. As a boy, Bruce first heard the reminiscences
of the old men who had fought in the Grand Army of the
Republic during the Civil War. The veterans' stories
made a lasting impression upon him, giving "a color
and a tone," Catton wrote in his eloquent memoir,
Waiting for the Morning Train, (1972) "not
merely to our village life, but to the concept of life
with which we grew up...I think I was always subconsciously
driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show
where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what
a great many young men on both sides felt and believed
and were brave enough to do."

After graduating from Oberlin College and serving in
the Navy, Catton got a job with the Cleveland News,
spent a brief stint at the Boston Herald-American,
then returned to Cleveland to work at the Plain Dealer.
From 1925-1929, he worked in the Cleveland office of
the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Enterprise Association,
producing articles, essays and reviews for the syndication
service, then moving to its Washington, DC bureau.

Bruce Catton was fifty when he began work on the first
two of what would become thirteen books on the Civil
War - Mr. Lincoln's Army, (1951) followed one
year later by Glory Road. His debut was hailed
by the Chicago Tribune as "military history
at its best." He "combines the scholar's appreciation
of the Grand Design with a newsman's keenness for meaningful
vignette," said Newsweek. Catton immersed
himself in a vast range of primary materials, especially
the diaries, letters and anecdotal reports of soldiers
on the ground, which gave his books from the outset
their unique, "you are there" ambience.

In 1954, Catton became the first editor of American
Heritage Magazine in Washington, where he remained
as Senior Editor until his death in 1978.

"There is a near-magic power of imagination in
Catton's work," wrote Oliver Jensen, who succeeded
him as editor of the magazine, "that seemed to
project him physically into the battlefields, along
the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age."

Indeed, there is an inexorable atmosphere from the
first pages of A Stillness at Appomattox, as
the Union Army begins to consolidate the diverse tributaries
of its forces for the last series of offensives. The
intensive orderliness of the Northerners stands in dramatic
contrast to the skirmishing, impromptu manner of the
Confederates when Grant's aggressive and arrogant campaign
seems to take on a life of its own.

As we march along with the Army of the Potomac, Catton
swoops and peaks, from the lofty perspective of the
White House down to the cries of the wounded in the
mud; from General George Gordon Meade pacing back and
forth with agitation under a tree, watching the battle
unfold on a field below, to the ever-shrinking gap between
the forces in blue and the outskirts of Richmond.

But there is one color permeating the entire narrative,
and that is neither blue nor grey, but rather the relentless
flow of blood -- "one long funeral procession,"
laments a despairing General Gouverneur Warren. Through
the grandeur of its elegiac tone, A Stillness at
Appomattox speaks magisterially of all wars.